Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday June 05, 2010 @04:25PM
from the raid-the-attic dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The MorphOS Team has released version 2.5 of its PPC computer-only operating system. The new version extends its support of the PPC Mac range to include the eMac, which was the 2002-2006 Mac model consisting of a CRT monitor and computer in a single housing. MorphOS previously and continues to support the PPC Mac mini, as well as the Pegasos and Efika niche computers (all discontinued but available second-hand). MorphOS includes a web browser and TCP/IP stack and a few traditional baseline OS-associated apps among its features. Further software is available from a range of online repositories. MorphOS 2.5 comes on a bootable 30-minute demo live CD ISO which may also be installed. The ISO is available for free download by anyone. The 30-minute limit is removed by online purchase of registration/key file which is available for a limited period for the sum of 111 euros to celebrate the launch of this version."

... do people really still use an OS that stopped being developed a decade ago?

Yep. Even older: The last DOS (MSDOS 4.01, running on a ancient Compaq) install I had to maintain was retired last July. This in a ~ 26bil (US) Fortune 500 company. It operated a testing apparatus. Lack of slow enough hardware (not kidding) to replace that Compaq was why it was retired.

I can top that! Last I heard my old gamer rig, which I had to dig out of my shed for a customer a few years back, a whopping Pentium 100Mhz with 32Mb of RAM, two PCI and 3 ISA slots, is STILL running DOS 3 in a lumber company down the road!

The owner of the mill left his kid in charge while he went on vacation, and wouldn't you know it that would be the time their ancient DOS 3 PC that ran the lathe that did custom columns would take a shit. The kid came into our shop practically having a heart attack, beca

People forget how far we have truly come. Hell my current GPU (A 4650HD with 1Gb of DDR2) which cost me a grand total of $36 is more powerful than my first FOUR PCs put together! Remember what it was like to fire up DOOM or Hexen for the first time, and marvel at being able to have real 3D? Or when the first Unreal was released? At the time I was running a P100Mhz with a brand new Voodoo, I think it had a whopping 8Mb, I know it had the old pass through for 2D support, and me and my friends just letting tha

> When folks bitch "This is slooow" because a program takes a whole 8 seconds to load, I just wish I still had one of my old 8Mhz DOS boxes

It is slow. Home computers would "boot" in a split second. Turbo Pascal 3.0 took maybe 5 seconds to load from floppy disk, and then it was lightning fast. Modern development environments are dead slow by comparison. Those were the good old efficient 8 bit days, when bloat was not generally tolerated.

When you're talking about an off the wall OS with VERY limited 3rd party app support, yeah, that's through the roof. Remember - everything is relative. $5 isn't shit to me, but if someone wanted to charge $5 for a paper clip that's still expensive for the product.

In that light, 111 (which should be round-about $150) is a LOT for this product, when in reality if you're already willing to deal with the realities of using a non-mainstream OS, Linux is a far better choice. And if you want something to play a

So David, let me ask you something: If you had a 17" G4 Macbook Pro, is there any advantage to using Ubuntu PPC in place of OS X? I've got such a machine and I don't use it much any more but I'd like to get some productivity out of it. So many of the programs that I use a Mac for now require Intel (Logic Studio, Netflix via browser, Eve Online) that unfortunately this beautiful machine is just not a go-to system for me any more. Considering it cost me 4 grand, I'd like to squeeze some more life out of

Well, MorphOS is one of the few Amiga-compatible OSes that remain that can run natively... MorphOS has some interesting concepts by itself... it does have some applications. I used it on Efika for a while... the only thing about MorphOS I came to dislike was the lack of virtual memory and the fact that it was closed-source. But certainly, you're right... Linux and even the BSDs are so good nowadays that there's barely a reason to use MorphOS (let alone AmigaOS 4) except for people who want (or need) to run an Amiga-like OS natively. The speed is certainly impressive. You'd get a lot of bang for the buck if everything related to it wasn't so expensive (the hardware, the OS, some of the software). There was an Intel-based clone of AmigaOS once but Amiga Inc. forced it off the market. Another aspect speaking for it is the simplicity of writing device drivers. So it can have some applications in the embedded area where time-to-market and speed are more important than price.

The thing is, why would you really need to run Amiga OS? Other than admiring the simplicity and the architecture and all that fun stuff, theres no real reason to run Amiga OS for day-to-day work that can't be done with a decent Linux distro.

As a Linux and Windows user and former Amigan I think the idea of keeping the Amiga alive is stupid. It would have been a cool PDA OS because of the short boot time and low requirements, but the time for that was back when PDAs had less computing power than the space shuttle. I wouldn't mind seeing the concepts reused, though. Amiga was full of good ones, not least that it had a genuinely working microkernel architecture, which was a big part of its hardware autoconfiguration scheme.

Likewise. I loved my Amigas, but I started accepting they were dead around 98 and we got a Windows box:/ I would have moved onto a PPC setup if I could afford it, but I was only 15. Now I can afford it, but I just don't really see the point in paying over the odds for it when Ubuntu on a cheap netbook can handle most of my requirements.

Security, stability, plethora of truly free applications...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster. Hell half the reason I dislike windows so much these days is the UI, I just work faster on my fully-customized linux machine.

Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons. I've seen no such arguments for MorphOS.

Security (c'mon...what malicious thing would run on MorpOS?), snappiness, plethora of Amiga and Amiga-style apps you love (and which work for you)...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster.

Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons.

Personally I think Linux distributions are clumsy and still not user friendly. I can easily get by with using a given Linux distro (or BSD) for a desktop, but I'd hate the extra hassle that it entails.

Linux has reached the point where it's really easy to install, and often it's a smoother process to set up a Ubuntu install than a Windows install on the same hardware (supposing you don't have hardware out of the ordinary or want to use media center functionality, play back media in non-open formats etc), bu

Cost has been the undoing of AmigaOS for many years...When i first got an Amiga, it was because the machine was relatively cheap while still being pretty capable. It was capable of gaming with the simplicity of a console, while also having an OS allowing serious and/or educational work to be done... You could buy one for your kids and they would enjoy playing games on it, but could also hook up a printer and do their school work.

However, once i started trying to get the amiga online that all fell apart... E

It was laughable back then and it's laughable now. I still check Aminet now and then, and there are still crazy people that release everything for the Amiga as shareware. It's insane when you compare with all the 100% free applications that people spend hours and hours on for linux.

Amithlon was perhaps even more interesting in its time - a fully transparent layer (build around a stripped down Linux or something) providing the ability to run AmigaOS 3.9, through JIT 68k emulation, on quite typical x86 machine. Also with binary compatibility and being the fastest Amiga back then, by a huuuge margin.

But killed quickly, supposedly due to some IP troubles; though I suspect the idea of not milking Amiga faithful was simply too hard to swallow.

Can the modern Amiga OS run old Amiga software?Yes, that's the point of MorphOS... (though if it doesn't run on a machine with custom Amiga chips (zombie "1200" with PPC accelerator for example), then the software depending on that chips won't run)

What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested...Having Amiga-like experience. Is that so hard to guess?...

What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested...Having Amiga-like experience. Is that so hard to guess?...

Yes, and what can you do with an Amiga-like experience (come on, the GUI, while it was innovative for it's time has nothing on Windows 7 or OS X) that can't be done more easily with a modern OS. If you're the kind of person that knows Workbench back-to-front and inside-out, and haven't learnt anything else in the intervening 15-odd years, then I'm sorry, but it's time to move on ^_^

Is there any Amiga-only software that is worth running today that doesn't depend on the custom hardware in the Amiga, is there

Wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper to just install an app that pops up a GURU Meditation error randomly and then fools you into thinking you can recover from it before forcing you to reboot the system?

Of course yes. Those who get it think so, apparently OS & OS-level apps is the part they care about here (though MorphOS can be run on, say, zombie A1200 with PPC accelerator), and why would you say they're wrong or why would you even care?

Well, this started out as what I thought would be obvious humor (GURU Meditation errors) in response to having the "real" Amiga experience. I honestly assumed I was going to get either a "funny" mod, or else someone would have told me to install GOMF (currently definition 2) [urbandictionary.com] to counteract the facetious app.

It would seem that you thought I was attacking you. Honestly, I was just being what I thought was funny. I probably shouldn't have carried it so far, but when it comes down to it, €111 is a ridiculou

IC, so you came to conlusion that I have no sense of humor in failing to notice your effort at it, while at the same time you missed inherently non-serious tone in the direct response; one about bsods, kernel panics and X crashes.

Sure, Amiga wasn't perfect (MorphOS is quite a bit more stable though, supposedly); still was probably the best thing for a long time, at least when looking at machines of reasonable cost. And the faults didn't seem to stop it from being used for reasonably serious stuff - kickstar

Yup, both MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 (and perhaps AROS) have 68k emulation layers to run legacy AmigaOS 1.x-3.x software.:)
But for some old software, you can fire up an Amiga emulator like UAE as well... it's only when you want to run the software more or less natively that you need one of those OSes.
Speed-wise, these OSes still outperform other OSes running on the same hardware... but if it's really worth the investment, that's a good question.
The user interface is still more or less the same, promisin

I just read that you'll still need UAE on those OSes if you want to run applications that were accessing the old Amiga hardware directly (like most games or demos). So, perhaps the best solution for you would be to run UAE or WinUAE. There's a nice (commercial) software package called AmigaForever from Cloanto that runs on Windows. But if you have the ROM images and OS disks, you can use the free versions of UAE on Linux or WinUAE as well.

What happened was that the distributor (Haage & Partner) supplied Kickstart ROM and related software for the developers Bernd Meyer and Harald Frank. It turned out that Haage & Partner were not licensed to distribute said software, so Bernd Meyer terminated his relationship with the company over breach of contract.

After this, Haage & Partner kept selling Amithlon for a considerable amount of time and lawsuits were filed against Bernd Meyer. Initia

The reasons some people might give for using GNU/Linux (Linux is just a kernel, after all) are probably similar to the reason that people might give for using MorphOS. Some people like the development environment (especially people who learned on AmigaOS), some people probably enjoy the efficiency of this OS on PowerPC hardware, and some people like to be different and not run the same software as everyone else.

There are no GUIs for GNU/Linux which are as efficient or as intuitive a

There's always AROS if you really want all that (and it and MorphOS have enough apps "to be usable on a day to day basis")

But since MorphOS, among few other things, is doing relatively (very relatively, yeah...) fine even with AROS around, perhaps its community doesn't care about those factors all that much (plus... [sourceforge.net])

As for the speed, and most notably the percieved speed...I wouldn't be so certain. Grab AROS, it's reasonably comparable for our needs (more rough though); there are even some VMs of recent buil

Aros didn't seem all that quick (tried it on a dell latitude c610, (1.2ghz cpu and 512mb ram - it wouldnt boot on my regular desktop)... Also when trying to rebuild the OS out of curiosity when it first became self hosting, it got slower and slower until it basically froze.

Yea, it was one of several OSes that was supposed to run on hardware confirming to the PReP/CHRP hardware standard that was created as part of the attempt to push PowerPC processor-based computers as an better alternative to IBM PC compatibles based on x86 processors. The Advanced Computing Environment's Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) standard was a similar standard created for a similar purpose, but for the MIPS processor instead of PowerPC.

To be fair, open source is by no means a requirement for something to be story-worthy. It seems that most of the computer stories these days are about Apple products, which are rarely open source.

Also, the Linux/BSD release "stories" are usually far more enthusiastic (or advertising) than this, even if the company that releases it aims to make a profit. I say this as a Linux fanboy, by the way...

Having to restart every 30 minutes is far from adequate and gives you no ability to test the long term stability...

MS gives you 180 days on their trial versions - a lot more useful than 30 minutes!

I remember the trial TCP stacks on amigaos - had the same issue, disconnected you after 30 minutes... On a slow dialup, 30 minutes wasn't enough to download anything (like another tcp stack without such limitations).

Incidentally, for those of us with old amigas, its no longer possible to register any of this softw

But how would it be worth $130+? Having an Amiga is all good an well but its a very dead platform. If this was freeware or better yet F/OSS it would be great. But for $130 I can buy a second hand x86 desktop, buy a used Amiga or just upgrade OS X/the hardware to Leopard.

If I really wanted a weekend project, why would I pay $130 for it? Amiga or MorphOS will never reach the same level of usability as Linux or OS X so why pay tons for an OS that is worthless?

It doesn't run anything which depends on those great custom Amiga chips though, only the "OS level" software. Not without UAE at least...but it doesn't really make a difference where you run the latter.

There was even better option a long time ago, Amithlon (probably quite a bit faster, to). I suspect there were not only merely problems with IP, but also somebody, at the time, thought that Amithlon doesn't provide enough opportunities to milk small fanbase out of their cash...

Would anyone seriously use this for anything more than the odd nostalgia kick?If this was free i might consider installing it and might use it once in a blue moon, but it certainly isn't worth 111 euros..

If i want to play with old Amiga software, i can install UAE and while i don't doubt MorphOS has some very efficient emulation code the fact that it only runs on fairly obsolete processors nullifies that advantage.

Modern Amiga software really has very little appeal, a lot of it consists of ports of open sou

Webkit isn't a browser, you know; it's an engine. They recently built a browser around Webkit which has very Amiga-like feel - that's a bit more accurate. Most/all software they use on MorphOS has that feel. "Fairly obsolete processors" notwithstanding. Doing it via UAE apparently doesn't quite cut it for its users...

For $150-ish dollars the same price as the OS, you could easily buy a cheap, second-hand x86 computer and do more. Or heck, why not just get PPC versions of Linux?

Unless MorphOS has some killer feature like the ability to emulate Windows perfectly, or something that Linux doesn't have, I'm not seeing the point in wasting hundreds of dollars on software that nothing really runs on.

Those all run great. I still run an fairly old version of Ubuntu on my B&W G3 tower. I have OSX 10.3 on it too and it runs okay, but Linux runs circles around the thing. Gentoo is a better choice for PPC these days because the ports.ubuntu.com stuff is not as well supported as the standard ubuntu stuff, back when I install the PPC version it was one of the main supported architecture for ubuntu. There is even Fedora Core for PPC, it's a little tricky to install but once it is on there it runs like a cha

I missed out on the thread about what it means to be a "real" Amiga. I think I will have to find it on AO and have a read.

I recently acquired a G4 MacMini and installed MorphOS 2.4. I am pretty pleased with its operation, especially how quickly USB devices are recognized and mass storage devices get mounted (excellent work, Chris, thank you!) There is a nice selection of software -- free, shareware, and commercial -- out there for the various Amiga-oid platforms. An